


swinging on the riviera

by starvels (dinosaur)



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bisexual Tony Stark, Developing Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Light BDSM, M/M, Major Character Injury, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Other, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:47:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/pseuds/starvels
Summary: Things Steve knows too well: blood, gun callouses, and the underside of a jaw with a neat goatee on it.When Steve starts sleeping with an agent from an opposing agency, it's just for the thrill. 20 cities and 20 illicit meetings later, the thrill is still there, but so are some other, more pesky feelings, too.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	swinging on the riviera

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy_dee811](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy_dee811/gifts).



> title from secret agent man, bc this fic's doc is titled secret_agent_man_mp3 and i'm easily amused.  
> i've had this on my comp for like 2 years now and felt it should see the light of day - hopefully to light missy_dee's day, haha. enjoy, hon and thanks for your endless MTH patience <3

Iron always has the best tech.

The coolest gadgets, the most improbably folded up clever bits of potential mayhem and beautiful, impossible programming. He picks the transit, the bedroom and sets the cameras to loop and the confirmation emails to bounce from VPN to VPN across the world like playing hopscotch with their treasonous lives.

Steve always has the best tactics.

The best sense for the best time, the right overlapping assignments that put them in the same time zone. He makes the back up plans for if they’re followed, if they’re overdue, if they ever bring more into the bed than fingerprints Steve wipes away and sheets he burns. He picks the strategy like cheerfully plucking an apple from the Garden of Eden.

The sex, they switch on.

\--

“If you pull my hair one more time, Cap,” he warns, voice rough from being fucked.

“You’ll what,” Steve manages, pulling a bit more.

The answering moan makes Steve bare his teeth in a grin.

They’re fucking in a small town outside of Brisbane and the sun is furious outside. At 16:15, Steve will need to unstick himself from the irresistible sweaty body under his hips and begin a room sweep. He glances at the digital clock on the bedside table.

15:45.

Perfect.

Steve presses his teeth to whatever skin is beneath his mouth.

“Fuck.” The man beneath him murmurs. Then again, stronger with the kicked up pace of Steve’s hips, “ _Fuck_. You’re illegally good at this.”

What they’re doing _is_ so illegal and so good.

Steve laughs. “Thank you.”

“Oh, _my_ pleasure.”

Steve’s voice drops low, “Oh, I’ll bet,” he presses against the skipping pulse, the slipping skin of this man whose name he doesn’t need or want to know and whose callsign he’s only recently been bequeathed.

Iron.

Iron is what they call him, forged by something more mercurial than the orders that tempered Steve into the Captain he is.

Steve’s not used to using it yet, still feels more comfortable with _hey you_ or _big blue eyes_ or _tongue so ardent it could make an angel weep_.

“Iron,” he tries on for size.

“Mm, yeah?”

“Jus checking,” Steve murmurs, and flexes his hand in Iron’s hair. Soft, silky, curling just slightly with their combined sweat.

Iron huffs out a laugh, “We’ll unless you invited someone else, it’s just me, Captain.”

“I think we’re doing just fine on our own, hm?” Steve pushes Iron’s knee higher, leans down harder into his next thrust.

Steve is Captain. Is SHIELD, SWORD, NATO, occasionally French, only when Agent Balroc needs babysitting. And now, now is Cap to a smooth, emphatic man called Iron who likes to leave Steve without a trace of his existence.

Iron is a figment, is rumours, is a collection of rotating letters and gateways lined with sparking motherboards and broken bridges.

Iron is laughing some more and saying, “Yeah, yeah, we’re managing, big boy.”

Steve turns Iron’s head, bites his upper society lip. Iron’s grease monkey hand catches Steve’s shoulder blades and pulls him closer.

They don’t ask each other what they can’t tell.

And it works, somehow.

\--

The first time, is a frozen, fucked up tundra that nearly drives its icicle fingers through Steve’s chest for hours before Iron lights a fire in the generator room of the base. Steve came here for the files, but Iron came here for the tech holding the files. It’s just both of their luck that Iron comes across Steve trying to find them.

By the time Steve is pulled out of the mess of ice and rebar he’s fallen into, he’s so far gone on endorphins and thankfulness, he pulls this strange sunglassed mirage into a cold, biting kiss just to feel something again. Just to prove he’s alive.

He’s still not sure what Iron was trying to prove by laughing and kissing him back.

It’s rough, the first time. It hurts, it prickles Steve with relief like an ages-old splinter pulled free. It’s the warmest thing Steve’s felt in years.

He makes it back to headquarters with 5 broken ribs, a body full of bruises and a GPS pin tucked into his forearm by Iron’s meticulous hands.

Six weeks later, Steve’s back on assignment.

Two days after that, he’s back on top of Iron.

Their treason is deliciously easy.

\--

“I just wanna know,” Steve whispers into his comm, as he preps to blow the hideout doors, sparing just one more glance through the scope at window. “How do they have the time?”

Inside, the marks are tangled up in bed, blinds hastily left askew. Their moans are faint through the comm line, from Natasha’s side. It’s the 6th time during this assignment Steve’s been privy to their marks’ sex life. He’s only tailed them for 3 days. Steve sighs out, focusing back on the door hinges.

“Used to be,” Natasha agrees on the line, “People dedicated themselves to their jobs, instead of fucking on them.”

That’s rich, Steve thinks, considering how many times he’s walked in on Clint and Natasha doing it in the armory.

“Uhuh,” he says. “Breach T20.”

“Roger, Rogers,” Natasha says, because she’s an ass.

“Callsigns, Widow,” he snips.

“If we’re gonna get professional,” Natasha continues, as she slinks out of the shadows at the bottom of Steve’s scope, “You should maybe check the amount of time you’re spending fucking on the job, too huh?”

Air clogs his throat but he can’t even clear it, much less respond, because he’s got to fire. Crosshairs on the notch, middle hinge, at the pin, places touched delicately with Natasha’s careful micro-charges, he fires. The door explodes inwards.

He swears Natasha laughs when she catapults through the broken metal.

“How about you first,” he mutters, when she’s done clearing the entry room and the bedroom where the marks were. They hadn’t even stopped fucking before Natasha tasered them. He checks the sightlines, takes out an overhead light in Nat’s way.

“I’d love to _meet them_ ,” Natasha says back, singsong, as she disappears into the darkness.

“I’d love to stop walking in on you and Hawkeye in the fucking armory,” Steve says, curt as he slings the rifle over his shoulder and starts picking his way downhill to the building. “We don’t all get what we want.”

“Shame. And don’t you mean _fucking_ in the armory?”

The vague sound of crashing metal and cries of alarm filter through the comms.

“Nah,” Steve says, twisting himself through barbed wire. “Just your mere combined presence in one room is enough to induce gagging.”

Natasha chuckles and Steve can’t help smiling back.

She’s joking, mostly, he knows.

Digging her spindly touch into his dirt for info, more than presenting him with anything. He’s covered his tracks well – Iron has, as well. But, Steve’s been a little too relaxed lately. Little too well satiated. It’s not bad for the job, he would have cut it off already if it was – but he has noticed his manic edge, his violent need to both start and end the fight, has curbed under the expectation of a good fuck in an ill-advised location with outrageous stakes.

Steve breaches the building from the West, a minute later, without waiting for Widow’s go-ahead, taking out the guard with a double tap of the rifle butt. He clears half the wing before she finds him. He’s lightly covered in blood, and down about 20 wrist-ties.

She stands there, less bloody than him and claps lightly.

He bows with a flourish.

\--

They do fuck a lot, though.

For the first months, it drives Steve giddy. First, as it’s so good. Then, as each time he expects it to get less good and it just, fucking. Doesn’t.

The chemistry between them tingles across Steve’s tongue. It scorches the space between their arms as they pass in opposite directions to the same hotel room. Never before has a partner balanced Steve so good. Iron likes biting. Iron likes sweet talking through a prolonged hand job. Iron likes to take it so good, loud as Steve’s never had someone be for him and then roll over and shove Steve into the pillow and give it to him just as good. Iron likes to walk that electric competitive line, likes to press his thumbs to the sides of Steve’s ribcage and dig out the intimacies that drive Steve’s heart wild, likes to press on them with his tongue, likes to fuck with the lights on so Steve can’t look away from his own wants.

They talk about their day jobs only in roundabout ways.

Iron touches a healing blister, the distinctive shape of a Hydra blaster on the back of Steve’s bicep and mutters a vicious, “Ugly snake bastards.”

Steve laughs, offers him a raspberry scone.

Details about their work are circumspect, tangential. Half-whispered peephole stories about spy rooms with slippery people that love sharing nuggets of gossip like chocolate blooming over their taste buds. Neither them can resist a good adventure thriller. But a page-turner is different from holding the main character in your hands instead.

Iron, Cap knows, is a main character in his agency’s books. His tech is too good, too smooth against the CCTVs in London, too efficient at destroying a base in nowhere Lithuania. His mind is too brilliant, sparking with idle innovation in the shower or popping up from behind a Santiago credenza with an EMP generator he made while waiting for Steve.

Steve has clearance so high it’s dangerous to himself to have it on his file, but he doesn’t use it to look at what he could know. He sticks with what he does know.

“Ow,” Iron mumbles into Steve’s collar, one day late May in Agadir, rough with salt water.

Steve’s eyes flutter shut.

“I’ve got you,” He eases them back into the bed, mindful of Iron’s torn bicep. “I’ve got you.”

Iron's body, Iron's naked trust, that's what he knows. Names are just names, after all.

Months into it, Steve has fucked, and been fucked, sucked, kissed, slept, in too many cities to remember, and his giddiness has rolled over into something no less thrilling, but exhilarating for its calm, sure sharing.

Then, in Barcelona, he learns something that shifts it again.

Iron loves to eat coconut by the slice. He loves to do it in the bright sun, smacking his lips with joy, right after fucking Steve for 3 hours.

“Nowhere else like it,” Iron says, crawling back into the hotel room via the window, gloves faintly glowing with some sort of magnet. Steve's just watched him traipse leisurely down the drainpipe and saunter across the road to flirt with the street vendor in what Steve knows is fluent Catalan.

“Still no sangria?” Steve asks, chin on his own bicep as he reads the copy of Frankenstein they’ve been sharing across three continents now.

In Barcelona, Steve watches Iron’s face flicker with a strange yearning sort of fear and shame and learns, without a telling, that Iron doesn’t drink and that he really, quite desperately wants to. “Mm,” he says, and shoves coconut in his mouth. Coconut water flicks across the bed, messy.

“I’m not,” Steve says, looking intentionally away to the pages, “a big fan of sangria, either,” then, quieter, unsure almost why except for knowing that he can – he admits, “My father probably was though.”

Old hurt, nearly gone dusty with not speaking of it -

But still, something. Something of his, of him. He eases the tension in his shoulders by shuffles a bit so Iron can curl up into his side. Warm and bright, Iron'll demand to be read to in a way that erases the pinprick of Steve’s father’s shouting from Steve’s too-sharp memories.

When Iron does just that, a minute later, and whispers, just the barest, lightest, "My father, too-"

Steve learns that he is not just a good fuck. Iron presses a kiss to the top of Steve’s shoulder, where an old, old cigarette burn lives and Steve’s throat clenches and he knows that what he knows is more than what a good fuck knows. What they know of each other is sharply intimate and that it burns all the way down his spine as he leans heavily into Iron’s warm weight.

In Barcelona, Steve knows he is Iron’s _lover_.

A month later, in some nameless city in Wisconsin, of all places, Steve shrugs away a kiwi Iron tries to hand feed him at 6am, and says, “I can’t,” and kisses Iron’s wrist instead.

 _I can’t_ meaning _it would be really unfortunate for me to get hives in the middle of blowing you in the middle of a field later_ , which Steve watches get translated into higher and higher eyebrows on Iron’s pretty twilight face.

In some nameless city in Wisconsin, Steve gets to watch a familiar realization break dawn across Iron’s face, lit gold with shocked joy. Gets to watch the blue of his eyes wide and just as captured.

Dropping the kiwi, Iron leans in to kiss him, gentle and abominably tender, cupping the sides of Steve’s unshaven face with sticky fingers and murmuring, “I can’t have grapefruit,” like it’s the keys to this bumfuck cheese factory city. Absolutely without value or purpose to anyone except Steve, who knows its rough diamond value, and tucks it away in his heart.

 _Yes_ , Steve thinks kissing him back, _yes, this. This is a secret I can keep._

\--

Steve really does intend to let it go on like that. He likes working in espionage. This thing with Iron is fun for so many reasons, but one of the most important being that there’s a safe distance between the two of them. But luck, as it would have it, is pretty determined where they’re concerned.

Steve finds out Iron’s name is Tony not so much by accident as he does by fiasco.

“You have to – you have to help me,” Steve stumbles over his words, applying pressure to the wound in Iron’s side. “C’mon, Iron.”

Iron just smiles at him, floating on pain.

“Noth’n wrong, ‘Ap,” he whispers, still trying to lean his head into Steve.

 _Nothing_ is wrong, is right, Steve thinks. Blood oozes out around his fingers.

 _Everything_ is wrong.

“What’s your extraction, Iron?” Steve tries again. “Where’s your handler?”

Iron shrugs bloody shoulders, winces to a stop quickly. He’s bleeding so much. Steve’s covered in it, fingers slick against the bare and torn meat of his torso, the unnatural give of his bones. His sternum is cracked, Steve is certain. Internal bleeding for sure. Who knows what else is ruptured.

“S’okay,” Iron murmurs, fingers twitching against Steve’s arms.

“It’s _not_ ,” Steve grits his teeth. “Where’s –“

Where’s Iron’s fucking support team, where’s his clever ridiculous technology, where’s Steve supposed to find bandages and emergency medical care.

How’s he supposed to find any of this while Iron is out of it and Steve can’t move. He needs to keep pressure on the wound, Iron doesn’t have enough strength for it. He doesn’t have a comm and for all the good that they’re in the middle of Versailles, they’re still tens of feet underground.

No one’s even looking for them.

This was supposed to be a silent assignment. The mission overlap was when they planned to meet as Steve went for the hardware and Iron went for the data, at cross-points in a corner of the base and have ill-advised raunchy exhibitionist sex. Check-in for either of them isn’t for another couple of hours. By then, it’ll be too late for Iron.

 _Please, God,_ Steve thinks.

Not like this.

Iron smiles at him, far too soft for the red splattered at the side of his mouth.

 _Focus,_ Steve, he orders himself.

_Save him._

He takes another precious minute to think through their situation.

Logistics. Options. Resources.

Steve can’t do anything while he’s here, but Steve _can_ leverage the bag of explosives he’s still carrying over the torn and rolled up jacket against Iron’s side. He can leave Tony with a gun and 22 bullets. He can play beat the clock against a few liters of blood.

“I have to leave you,” Steve says, heart crawling into his throat.

Iron doesn’t even look surprised.

He just nods, rubs his hands once more over the back of Steve’s arms before letting them flop down. It spills a mountain of magma in Steve to see it. How many people, Steve wonders, have left this man to die on his own? How many people has the man smiled at and let go of?

“No,” he grips Iron’s hand. Left hand dominant, knowledge whispers in the back of his mind. He curls Iron’s fingers around the gun, slides the safety for him, settles the bag and the bullets on top of his torso. “I will be back,” he says like an order to them both.

When he kisses Iron, his lips come back copper wet.

He carries the rusted taste with him all the way out of the compound, all the way through taking out the 10 guards left standing outside, lethal force under his own authorization, all the way to the third guess in the most probable places for Iron’s handler to be hiding.

“Medical evac. North-east sub-basement 6. _Turn on his GPS_ ,” Steve shouts, as he skids into the room where a dark-skinned man wearing kevlar sits amidst a sniper rifle and a collection of technology Steve doesn’t try to identify.

The man swings a Glock to bear at him casually, face impassive.

Steve keeps his hands in the air and his body still.

It’s been 12 and a half minutes since Steve left Iron bleeding on a dirty floor.

“Cracked sternum,” he continues, voice hoarse, “dislocated knee, broken nose, stab wound to left abdomen. Possible broken ribs and punctured lungs.”

It doesn’t sound like the calm injury reports he’s been trained to give.

It sounds like despair.

The handler’s hand tightens for one long moment, before he reaches out with his free hand to press a key combination on a laptop beside him.

A small digital tone and then voice clicks over into the room.

“Online.”

“Location and condition,” the man says, watching Steve, tendons flexing in his jaw.

A too long pause, 10 seconds Steve can feel air slicing into his chest and then the voice – a computer, Steve thinks, some sort of smart-gps? A field medic AI? – starts again, faster this time, as if computers could sound urgent.

“Location: 48°47'59.1"N 2°08'47.2"E. Medical condition: critical. Multiple injuries detected. Medical evac recommended. Location ready to transmit.”

“Deploy,” the man’s voice is tense, but his hand on the gun hasn’t wavered.

The computer screens flicker through a series of screens.

“Medical evac deployed. Additional extraction information requested.”

The man stares at Steve.

“He was conscious and cognizant 13 minutes ago. The injuries listed is what I know. The temperature in the tunnels is 10 C. I can,” Steve fights against clenching his fists. “I can show you the route that I took out, direct to him.”

The handler, Iron’s handler, who Steve is thinking might just be codenamed Steel, because his raised gun arm hasn’t wavered at all, gestures towards a map of the tunnels on one of the screens. Steve moves forward carefully, using the back of a knuckle rather than his fingertip, to draw the circular route. The computer highlights it in gold instantly, even asks Steve the number of enemy combatants at each chokehold point.

He taps 0 every time.

Gun tracking Steve’s moves, the handler says to the computer, “Send updated route information to medical evac, when input has ended.”

“Acknowledged.”

Steve steps back when he’s done. The gun follows him.

“Anything else?” the guy says, voice chilly.

Steve bites his tongue to not say, ‘Don’t tell anyone about me.’ He doesn’t have that right. The handler will do what is best for Tony, Steve knows. He has to try and trust that the handler thinks Steve, and not revealing their connection to the whole of the tangled secret service web, is what’s best for Tony.

Instead he just says a quiet, “The explosives that are on him, those aren’t issue.”

The handler’s eyes narrow.

“No?”

“No.”

A pause. Steve watches the med evac helicopter appear at the corner on the map screen. It’s close. Closer than Steve would have hoped.

He exhales, chest deflating. The handles eyes flicker down to it. Something about his discrete navy uniform must give away something, because the handler’s gun hand tightens.

“You’re Captain,” he says, rolling the thought over his tongue.

Steve doesn’t wince, because he’s better trained than that, but he does say, “I should go.”

“I should bring you in.”

One step backwards. “You should,” Steve agrees. “But you won’t.”

“No.” the handler says, eyes narrowed in thought, “He wouldn’t want me to.”

Steve doesn’t agree with that, can’t. It’s true. It shouldn’t be. It can’t be, for both their sakes, because of this exact thing. He takes another step back, almost around the corner of the door jam, now. The handler doesn’t stop him.

As Steve turns to go, the man sighs almost silently, finally lowering the gun muzzle to the ground and whispers, “ _Tony_ ,” like he’s saying ‘you idiot.’

That’s when Steve learns; _Tony_.

Because there’s no one else Steve has met that can inspire that sort of frustrated, helpless annoyance out of love.

Four long days later, Steve will whisper the name in much the same tone, one hand on the bruised and battered man’s face, the other on the window ledge, in case someone finds him in this hospital where he absolutely ought not to be.

And Tony, _Tony_ – not iron, but stronger, more. Fragile and blossoming with tiredness and pain and longing will whisper, “I’ll understand if you. If this. This is too much.”

 _If I am too much,_ Steve hears.

Because there’s no other way around it. It’s not just trysts now, it’s not just a bit of fanciful fun on the side like a tongue-in-cheek secret. It’s not just being physical lovers. It’s not just allergies and addictions and their _bodies_.

“Tony,” Steve says again and leans their foreheads together to watch Tony’s beautiful bloodshot eyes flutter closed and then desperately open. “My name is Steve.”

**Author's Note:**

> will maybe update this with more! i have some additional stuff written, but whether its a complete story i don't know. stay tuned and let me if there's something you'd love to see, i guess? 
> 
> all comments and critiques greatly appreciated! writing is so much easier in community <3 thanks for reading


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